


To Satisfy Your Expectant Tongue

by givesmevoice



Category: The X-Files
Genre: (lots of fluff), F/M, Fluff, Romance, and lots of tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:02:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25811035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/givesmevoice/pseuds/givesmevoice
Summary: The power and love of being seen and someone knowing how you take your tea.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 6
Kudos: 52





	To Satisfy Your Expectant Tongue

**Author's Note:**

> There's actually a long-ish background for this fic, but the short version is that it's extremely heavily inspired by Cold Tea Blues by Cowboy Junkies. (I stole the title from the song, too.)

I.

They know each other now, have been through the Arctic and evil psychic child clones. A man made of rubber with a taste for liver had twisted, squirmed, squeezed his way into her home. An evening with Mulder in her kitchen is still work, and work continues even as her clock ticks past 10, 10:30pm. There are files spread in front of them, her notes from an autopsy compared to an autopsy performed by a county coroner a dozen years ago. She wishes they could call the coroner now. Caught up in the tempest of her partner’s passion for their work, she forgets that not everyone keeps the same hours. That a county coroner from a case a dozen years ago might already be climbing into bed, the lights extinguished, the peaceful sleep of someone who has never come face to face with a man staring down imminent death happily leading a grieving FBI agent and her partner on a wild goose chase. 

“Mulder, I don’t know what else you expect me to find.” She sighs and stands. She needs something to distract her for a minute before getting back to comparing her own overly-detailed notes with the scant notes of someone who didn’t seem concerned about his victim’s twisted femurs. “Tea?” She fills the kettle - it’s full enough for two cups regardless of his answer. 

“Yeah. I’m surprised you drink caffeine after dinner, Scully.” He smiles easily at her as she drops tea bags - Earl Grey - into matching white mugs. “How are you going to fall asleep?” She rolls her eyes, settling back down in her chair.

“Mulder, unless you plan on leaving here without an answer, I won’t be going to sleep for hours. I figured we could both use a boost that’s a little more subtle than an espresso.” She tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear, pushes her glasses back up her nose, refocuses on her notes. He falls silent for a minute, a comfortable silence of two people who spend enough time together in rental sedans.

“It reminds me of Oxford.” He stops, starts again. “The tea. We used to drink tea in our tutorials. I had never had as much tea in my whole life as I did my first term at Oxford. Sometimes we’d have those tiny cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and no one took my recommendation for peanut butter and banana sandwiches for the next tea.” Scully looked up and snorted before refocusing on her notes.  _ The last autopsy had a note that there was evidence of screws to help heal a fracture....  _ “I thought I missed coffee until I tasted the swill in the bullpen for the first time. Took me months to get over that and go to the cart outside for some high-quality dark roast.”

The kettle whistles and whines. She’s too lost in thought, suddenly realizing that the holes weren’t for screws. Her patient had drill marks, too. The connection was there, the connection was drill holes, repeated and unallowed to heal properly. “Mulder!” She looks up, her mug of tea in front of her, filled and wafting bergamot towards her. She smiles at him, stands to get the milk from her fridge, ready to ride this wave of caffeine as they put the pieces together.

II.

Her bones still feel old. She wonders what her autopsy will show, what record there will be of her rapid aging and de-aging. If she were a tree, what rings would be there? How would she puzzle herself out in an autopsy bay, impossibly wielding the knife on her own body that’s been taken on extraordinary adventures.

Her bones feel impossibly old, still. She knows Mulder feels the same, worse, as they sink into the cracked leather of his couch. There is a case report to file, tickets on Norwegian Air to expense. Her mind, still sharp and ready to dive into the mystery of what happened on that ship, battles with her fingers, joints still  _ just _ swollen, not nimble enough for the keys on her laptop. She didn’t know the skin on her fingers could feel so tight.

Mulder has been preparing to stand in response to the kettle’s siren call for at least five minutes, and when he finally has to push himself into a standing position, they both wince at the crackle and pop of his knees. As he pours the water, makes the trip back to the couch, Scully thinks the least she can do to repay him is work on the report. He sits next to her, sighing as though he is Odysseus, come home to Penelope at last. Their mismatched mugs of Earl Grey sit side-by-side, his and hers Sasquatch and Yankees. 

“Oh, Mulder, I…” she pauses, there’s already milk. Her tea is the exact right color - tawny, Missy calls it. She hears a rustle of paper and sees his palm extended, pilfered packets of sugar, Splenda, Sweet’N Low, an offering. She smiles at him, relieving him of his burden as he closes his eyes.

“Before you ask, I was in the habit of stealing sweeteners before we looked like we were ready to summer in the Catskills.”

  
  


III.

Scully knows it’s a fool’s errand to order tea in a roadside diner. She’s had too many cups made with just-not-quite-boiled water to know to stick with coffee. The coffee usually isn’t bad. But just as Mulder learned to emphasize that he wants  _ rye _ toast, lest he end up with  _ white _ or  _ dry _ toast, Scully has learned to take coffee and accept all the free refills she’s entitled to.

He watches her carefully pour cream into her coffee, tap two packets of sugar against the table, tear them open and shake the contents into her mug. What would be called regular coffee in New York, in Boston, in a roadside diner in Iowa, populated by truckers whose blood coffee content is well over the legal limit, it’s an abomination.

“Better than that swill they try to pass as coffee in the bullpen, at least.” She arches an eyebrow, smiling. In a seemingly unending parade of death and dying, of counting down days to the inevitable, today is a good day.

“I say we toast to that, Agent Scully,” he says softly, raising his mug to hers before draining the last of his coffee. His mug barely touches the table before their waitress is back, filling it to the stained line, the high-water mark of his endless cups of coffee in a roadside diner in Iowa. (It is absolutely a fool’s errand to try and order tea here.)

IV.

She wonders if coming over was a good idea, if accepting his offer of tea was a good idea. It’s almost unseasonably cold, even for January. Two weeks have passed since they fought zombies, watched the ball drop on the not-millennium-millennium. Two weeks since he looked and looked and looked at her before leaning down and gently brushing his lips against hers. It’s all she’s been able to think about. A grown woman, a medical doctor, an FBI agent. All she’s been able to think about is her partner’s cloud-soft bottom lip and how, if he hadn’t been injured, she might have felt it dragging over more of her body…

“Arm’s all better, Doc.” He’s cheerful, stretching both arms over his head, revealing the tiniest and most important patch of skin and hair between the hem of his shirt and the top of his sweatpants. “Coach wants to know when I’ll be able to shoot three pointers again.”

“How were you at shooting three pointers before the zombie attack, Mulder?” She sits back on his couch, idly flipping through a file. She doesn’t want to work tonight. She’s not sure she wants to be here tonight, not with the crisp air calling for warm Navajo blankets and arms around her, not with the temptation of men with lips like clouds and tummies that deserve monographs in  _ The Annals of Infuriatingly Handsome FBI Agents _ . She finally looks up at Mulder, mock devastation written all over his face as he brings his hand to his heart.

“I know you’ve never paid attention to my displays of boyish athleticism, but you didn’t need to deliver such a devastating blow. I know you shoot to kill.” He turns on the kettle, sets their mugs on the counter, an updated Yankees mug for her, reliable Sasquatch for him. Mulder settles on the couch next to her, not giving her the chance to shift over for him. (She didn’t want to shift over for him.) He’s so close, they make a Venn diagram; the Mulder circle and the Scully circle have been overlapping more as each year has gone by. She wonders if his heart is in the overlap, too, where hers has been longer than she’d like to admit.

“Maybe we can play some one-on-one sometime. I’m sure the boys at your gym wouldn’t mind?” Scully has no idea what to blame that burst of courage on. She’s an abysmal basketball player, too easily discouraged by Bill when they were younger.

“If you came down to the gym in that little skirt you wore yesterday, Scully, those boys wouldn’t know how to find the three point line.” Has his hand been on her knee, the overlap of their Venn diagram, this whole time? “But you’d have to have some mercy for us, g-woman.” His hand slides a little higher, and she can’t tear her eyes away from it, even as she feels his heated gaze on her face.

“I...I’m not very good at basketball,” she admits softly, looking up at him from beneath her lashes before dropping her gaze back down to watch his hand traverse the landscape of her thigh, higher and higher. 

“Well...I’m a good teacher.” His hand stops, she looks up at him again. “You’re a good student, and we know your aim is deadly.” He smiles, his eyes so soft and green that she can’t help but think of a meadow, of laying in the sun of his smile and basking in the warmth that’s miles away from winter in Washington. 

The kettle screams, an impatient alarm that warns her she’s gotten too close. Mulder squeezes her thigh; he leaves his warmth behind as she closes her eyes to try and absorb more of it before they need to come to their senses. They can’t. They shouldn’t. She won’t.

“Did you find anything interesting in the files?” He asks, settling down next to her, handing her mug over. She curls her hand around it, allowing the heat of her tea, the warmth of Mulder’s 1999 World Series Champions mug, the illusion that he transferred something from himself to his mug and then to her, sink into her bodily for a moment before answering.

“Not yet. Do you have sugar?” She’s surprised he didn’t bring his assortment of packets with him and she makes to stand to get some from his kitchen. His hand is on her knee again, stopping her.

“It’s in there. Two sugars. That’s how you like it, right?” Oh, oh how can he look at her with that smile and those soft eyes again like that. He takes her mug and sets it on the coffee table, next to his. “I’ve watched you make your tea, make your coffee.” His hand leaves her knee and comes to cup her face, his thumb traces her bottom lip. “I’ve watched  _ you _ , Scully. I want to give you what you need, to satisfy your expectant tongue…” His lips replace his thumb and  _ oh _ this is what she needs, this is the only thing that can satisfy her.

She kisses him back, thinking that he tastes better than any tea with milk and two sugars ever will.

V.

The two mugs of tea still sit on the coffee table the next morning, having long since grown cold. He makes her a fresh cup and steals kisses between still-too-hot sips. 


End file.
